Newsletter: 13/11/2014

Office news

It's summer again and our office trees are still alive though resemble bonsai after a pruning. Alex's daughter is almost two and his son is in his first year of school. Roland ran a marathon in Rotorua. Priscilla has moved house and now has a lemon tree and supplies her colleagues with lemons to help fight colds. Roland has been working to get all customers onto the latest version of the Tcl software, nearly all workstations have now been switched over.

Russell Bell

Email a note to selected users

Fastbase for many years has allowed you to create Notes against customers, suppliers, parts, fixed assets and GL accounts. For a customer a note will typically be for a sales opportunity or activity, a pricing enquiry or order fulfillment task or a financial account or payment issue. For a part a note will typically provide information helpful when purchasing or selling the item. Such a note will appear as a pop-up when adding the part to a purchase order or customer sales order or invoice. A note has a type, priority, assigned-to user, subject, details and additional followup-notes.

Fastbase automatically sends an email when a note is assigned to a different user, or when a note is completed. An email can also be triggered manually using the "Email note? Y/N" option. Previously this email was only sent to the person the note is assigned to. You can now email a note to one or more selected users.

We have changed the "Email Note?" field so that pressing F1 while the cursor is in the field will bring up a multi-selection list of all Fastbase users. You may select one or more users who will be emailed whenever this note is maintained. The selected users for a note is retained. So that next time the same note is maintained, the same users will be emailed.

Note that the user maintaining the note does not themselves receive an email.

New fields on Parts Price-List Import

It is possible to import new parts, or import changes to existing parts, into Fastbase from a CSV file via Maintenance - Miscellaneous - Inventory - import parts Price File. We have recently expanded this import feature to allow importing additional product fields, including the Product Code/Category.

Selection of multiple call cycles

A number of the customer reports in Fastbase (see below) allow selection of customers by various criteria: the customer branch, area, customer type, salesperson or call cycle. These reports all have a Selected Customers field. By default all customers are included (except for deleted accounts). Or you can press F1 on the field and select an individual customer or all customers that meet certain criteria.

For example you could run a report for customers of a single selected customer type, or you could select multiple customer types to be included in the report. Fastbase now allows selection of multiple Call Cycles when running these customer reports.

The following Customer Order reports include this new feature: Orders taken report, Order status report, Order performance report, Quote Status report, Quote Expiry report, and the Quote Summary report. The following Sales Reports include the new feature: Customer Sales Analysis report, Customer Sales sorted, Active Customers by salesperson report, Stock Sales Analysis and the Customer Activity report.

Back-order warning

When you add a part to customer order, Fastbase has a warning feature that you may not be familiar with. If the customer already has another order (which hasn't been completely fulfilled) where the same part is on backorder Fastbase will display a warning, alerting the user that the customer may be accidentally placing a duplicate order.

This behaviour is controlled by a setup option, we enabled the feature by default two months ago. Let us know if you want this disabled.

Fastbase on Windows 8

Customers are using Fastbase on Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8. We have fixed a problem that affected Fastbase when running on Vista and later versions. In some circumstances when the user minimised the Fastbase application they were not able to un-minimise it, Fastbase got "stuck" to the Windows task bar. This now works correctly.

Anti-virus software on Windows servers

We have had several incidents over the last few months where a customer has been prevented from using Fastbase due to anti-virus software on the customer's server misbehaving. Typically what happens is a Fastbase component is disabled, deleted or quarantined by the anti-virus software. In other words the server has an auto-immune episode, the body attacks itself. These incidents are disruptive and restoration and recovery can take a while, and often needs the help of your IT support.

If you use anti-virus software on your Fastbase server, be sure to configure it to ignore all Fastbase software components and folders. You should also configure any server file-system backup software to ignore the MySQL data directory, this can also cause problems.

Dual monitor support

Some people like to use dual monitors on their workstation so they can have more room allowing multiple applications to be visible at the same time. We have improved the Fastbase support for dual monitors.

Fastbase sometimes displays pop-up windows, for example alerts and warnings and when entering a line-item. Now all pop-up windows appear centred over the main Fastbase window, regardless of which monitor the main Fastbase window is on. Drop-down selection menus are also now better behaved in a dual monitor setup.

Customer keyword search now includes Contacts and Delivery addresses

Under Customer Enquiry you can search for customers by Keyword. You may enter one or more words and Fastbase will find all customers that have matching words in the customer number, name, additional name, email address or postal address fields. Now the customer keyword search also matches on customer contacts and delivery addresses.

So if you search for the name of a person listed as a contact on a customer the keyword search will now find the customer. Likewise if you search for a suburb or town the search will find any customer with a delivery address for that suburb/town.

This works in other areas of Fastbase, anywhere you select a single customer, for example when creating a customer order you can press F1 in the customer field and you will see a Keyword Search field.

This also works on the Search tab on the main screen of Fastbase. You may not be familiar with this, on the main screen this Search tab provides a quick keyword search for customers, suppliers, parts, assets and GL accounts.

Newsletters

Select from the following list of newsletters that have been sent out.

28/11/2013 Office News, Quoting for items that aren't recorded as parts in Fastbase, Stream-lined entry of new part assembly transactions, Sorting of customer notes on the appointments screen, Maintaining a customer note - "Complete" button save and exit